Digital Affordances in Digital Entrepreneurship: A Systematic Literature Review

Digitalization has reshaped how entrepreneurs recognize opportunities, access resources, design business models, and scale new ventures. Yet the literature on digital entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial ecosystems, digital platforms, and digital startups remains fragmented. Many studies treat digital technologies as a broad context for transformation, whereas far fewer examine digital affordances as a mechanism explaining entrepreneurial behavior. The article synthesizes the literature at the intersection of affordance theory, digital entrepreneurship, and digital entrepreneurial ecosystems and identifies the mechanisms through which digital affordances influence entrepreneurial processes. The study employs a systematic literature review design guided by PRISMA 2020. The final review sample comprises 24 publications selected on the basis of thematic relevance, scholarly impact, and substantive application of the affordance perspective. Five research clusters were identified: opportunity recognition; access to resources and support; business model innovation; ecosystem and platform dynamics; and the emergence and scaling of digital startups. The review shows that digital affordances constitute an intermediate sociotechnical layer linking the technological properties of the digital environment to entrepreneurial outcomes. They reduce transaction costs, broaden the range of knowledge sources, accelerate experimentation, and may simultaneously increase platform dependence. The practical contribution of the study lies in proposing a typology of digital affordances and an analytical framework for examining them as targets of managerial intervention and entrepreneurship support policy. The article’s originality lies in integrating fragmented streams of literature through an affordance-based framework and shifting the analytical focus from digitalization in general to configurations of digital affordances that are relevant to entrepreneurs.

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